Currently, for virtualized data centers, visibility of orchestration engines, such as vCloud Director, Openstack, and Cloupedia, to name a few, is limited to the hypervisors and virtual switch managers. Such orchestration engines provision virtual machines (“VMs”) and their resources, both on the hypervisor and on the virtual switches. All of these VMs talk to the other VMs or to the infrastructure outside the data center via the data center network fabric. The network fabric comprises a collection of Top of Rack (“ToR”) switches, referred to as leaf switches, that in turn are connected by a set of spine stitches. The orchestration engines do not have visibility into the fabric; similarly, the switches in the fabric have no visibility into the server and their hypervisor infrastructure. Hence, the switches cannot relay to the network or server administrators information regarding where a particular VM is physically attached to the network.
A crude way of tracking this information would be to dump the Address Resolution Protocol (“ARP”) and Media Access Control (“MAC”) tables and then attempt to correlate the information to form a table of directly attached local hosts. This is not only unwieldy but would make it very difficult for the administrators to correlate the information across various databases; moreover, the information would be provided on a per-interface or per-virtual Network Interface Card (“vNIC”) basis, rather than a per end host/VM basis.